Update: All we wrote starting in 2007 about the disaster of the Obama situation comedy “coalition” and that it would lead to the destruction of the Democratic Party is now confirmed. We attacked the demographic fantasies and delusions woven by John Judis (who eventually was forced by reality to recant) and Ruy Teixeira, which led to the Obama nomination, as madness. By 2015 we prevailed with our analysis and Judis rewrote the “emerging Democratic majority” into “the emerging Republican advantage“. We were correct. Hillary2016 would not listen to our warnings (“Hillary Clinton 2016 take note of the Mistake in ’08 and don’t repeat them or get tied to them in 2016. Matt Bai regurgitates what we wrote years ago:

Democrats lost because for a while now they’ve been telling themselves a story about modern politics. [snip]

This particular story goes all the way back to 2002, when the writers Ruy Teixeira and John Judis published an influential book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” At a time when Democrats were dispirited, Teixeira and Judis argued, presciently, that the country’s demographics were evolving in ways that would ultimately favor their candidates. [snip]

Basically, the party’s leading funders and operatives decided that they didn’t have to pander to white people living outside of cities anymore, because with each passing year their voters were cementing a new majority and redrawing the electoral map. [snip]

Barack Obama’s two elections seemed to them to validate this new Democratic math. [snip]

And so this was Hillary’s driving theory of the race. [snip] She ran on a database, rather than on an argument; [snip]

But the Cult of Demography was built on some very flawed assumptions. [snip]

The second problem is that even if you buy that a Democrat can maximize turnout among minorities and the already converted, it doesn’t mean you can simply forget about everyone else. [snip]

According to excellent reporting by the New York Times’ Amy Chozick, no less a strategist than Bill Clinton himself argued to his wife’s campaign command that she, too, needed to speak to white working-class voters. No one listened. They were all about the database. [snip]

It assumes that Republicans can’t field a candidate who appeals to some larger segment of black or Latino voters, a third of whom voted Republican this year.

It assumes, too, that younger voters don’t grow more ideologically diverse as they age.

Unhinged, psychotic, infantile, Hillary Clinton supporters are unable to work, crying, bereft of the will to go on with their pathetic lives because of the shock and surprise [???] of Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 elections. Just how stupid are these people? Hillary Clinton deserved to lose and it was obvious she was going to lose – as we charged repeatedly since at least 2013, because Hillary Clinton ran the dumbest, stupidest, campaign for president we have ever seen. Get that through your thick, whimpering, whiny, heads. Hillary2016 was the dumbest, stupidest, campaign we have ever seen. We call forth the witnesses for the prosecution, Bill Clinton, Trump hater Kurt Eichenwald, Mark Penn, and everyone with a mature brain that functions.

How stupid was Hillary Clinton this election cycle? Let’s discuss Hillary’s strategic decisions, campaign manager Robby Mook who lived up to his last name (just as Trump lived up to his), and the Obama protection squad Hillary Clinton paid to run her campaign even though their interest was to defend and protect Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton.

Let’s start with the campaign strategy stupidity. We won’t belabor our oft repeated statement going back years that 2016 was a change election year and that the candidate of change would win. Let’s examine instead another stupid campaign strategy. A campaign “strategy” that relied on winning the same or more black votes than Obama, was stupid. Get that through your thick wittle skulls children. Barack Obama, because of the color of his skin not the content of his character, incited a massive turnout of black voters in 2008, practically all of whom voted for Obama. In 2012 Obama also received practically all of the black vote, although black voters turned out in lower numbers than in 2008.

Further, as was proved in 2009, 2010, and 2014, the cult of Obama would not turn out for anyone other than Obama. Just look at the election results in those years. Hillary Clinton either was too stupid to bother looking at the election results for those years or she is just stupid generally.

Once Hillary Clinton, convinced by the Obama operatives she appointed to run her poll operations and much of the Hillary2016 apparatus, decided it was somehow smart to adopt the campaign strategy that relied on a black turnout equal to our surpassing the black turnout for Barack Obama, this led to further stupidity.

Further stupidity??? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Further stupidity such as almost always campaigning in black neighborhoods and black churches. Further stupidity as in embarrassments such as the ‘I always carry hot sauce in my purse’.

Whether Hillary loves hot sauce or it was just a pander is mostly irrelevant. The problem with the episode is that the all too obvious reliance on black voters alienated voters who were not black because why vote for someone who hardly ever comes to ask for your votes because you are not black? On election night this alienation of non-black voters (and black voters insulted by the all too obvious craving for black votes) came home to, um, roost. As anyone who remembers Bill Clinton’s Sista Soulja moment will understand, the significance of Bill’s rebuke of the black racist who suggested blacks kill white babies was that white voters and those of other races and ethnic groups were reassured that Bill Clinton would defend them too, not just black voters. Bill Clinton in 1992 understood that he had to appeal to voters of all races, not just pander to blacks, even if black voters are very important in Democratic Party politics.

There was little the Clinton operatives could do about the “scandals” they inherited when they signed up to work for the former secretary of state. But Clinton allies are also faulting the campaign for failing to develop a credible message for downscale white voters, arguing she could have won by a larger margin on the economy.

And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. [snip]

But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.

That loser Mook, who was truly allied to Hillary Clinton and wanted her to win, did not fight the Obama stalwarts that had infected Hillary2016 like Ebola. But read that bit again about Joel Benenson and how the strategy he developed for Hillary2016 demanded he tell Bill Clinton that “the voters from West Virginia were never coming back” to the Democratic Party. This is what we wrote in April 2015:

Earlier we referred to Hillary as a blind-deaf drunk caught in a forest. Hillary’s blindness and deafness are self-afflicted. The eyes and ears of a candidate and her campaign are based on polls. Hillary has chosen for her campaign the Obama pollster Joel Benenson. Benenson’s chief interest is Obama protection not Hillary election. Hillary cannot see nor hear what her pollster won’t show or tell her. Hillary is effectively blind and deaf which renders her dumb. If you thought Mark Penn was a problem in 2008, compared to Benenson pollster Penn is a treasure.

Joel Benenson did not give a whit about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Benenson wanted to give life to the lies of Obama2008. What were those lies? The biggest lie is that Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton. No, it was Big Media that defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008. Put aside the corruptions which denied Florida and Michigan votes to be counted, because if they were counted Hillary Clinton would have had more votes than Barack Obama. What we mean is that Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2008 by Big Media because Big Media protected Barack Obama and attacked anyone who ran against Barack Obama (McCain too, then in 2012 Romney, in 2016 Donald J. Trump defeated Big Media).

But Joel Benenson and the others from Obama2008 convinced stupid Hillary Clinton that her campaign in 2008 failed because she (1) constantly made changes to her strategy and personnel; (2) the Obama “coalition” beat the FDR/Kennedy/Clinton coalition. In 2016 Joel Benenson wanted to prove once and for all that the Obama “situation comedy” demographic was the future for the Democratic Party even though all the evidence from 2009, 2010, 2014, proved otherwise.

The white working class chased out of the Democratic Party by Obama’s Kook coalition had no where to go but to the Republican Party. Now the former Democrats join in solidarity with the long time populist Republicans – ergo TRUMP.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Hillary2016 understands any of this.

That article from last year pretty much summarizes what happened on election day 2016. And here we will digress for a moment to further gloat about how on target we have been:

The next president of the United States will have a Republican controlled House of Representatives. Republicans will continue to control most state houses as well and in addition will continue exclusive control of both legislature and governors’ mansions in the majority of states. Because of Barack Obama’s illegal usurpations of constitutional order it is now also likely that the next president will also have a Republican Senate (especially if the Senators from South Dakota and West Virginia bolt from the lawless Obama Dimocrat Party).

All of that is exactly what happened. Hillary Clinton did not see the obvious however.

Hillary Clinton ran the dumbest, stupidest, campaign we have ever seen. Pity poor Bill Clinton as he watched Hillary2016 controlled by Obama acolyte Benenson and Robby the Mook. Poor, poor Bill Clinton saw the danger but could not change the mind of stupid Hillary Clinton:

Bill Clinton stood before an audience of blue-collar workers in Lansing, Mich., two days before the presidential election and told them he understood and empathized with the economic frustrations of the working class.

“There’s a lot of road rage out there because after the financial crash, it took a long time before incomes started going up again. There are still some families that if you adjust for inflation, their incomes are about what they were the last day I was president more than 15 years ago and their costs are going up. And that’s really tough,” the former president drawled as he campaigned on behalf of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“So when you get up every morning, and you look in the mirror and you don’t think you’ve got the power to make tomorrow better than today, that’s a pretty tough load to carry,” he told an audience that included union laborers.

Compared to the main themes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the former president’s remarks in Lansing seemed like an off-script moment.

The team’s tightly coordinated list of talking points did not include much of anything on working-class woes.

It certainly did not include anything specific about addressing the anger and frustrations of white rural voters in the South and the region known as the Rust Belt, which spans Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin. Once the epicenter of American industrialization, the Rust Belt has fallen on harder times, and teems now with voters who are unhappy about lost jobs, shuttered factories and struggling businesses.

Lansing, it turns out, was not a one-off incident for Bill Clinton. It certainly was not a first for him on the campaign trail.

His comments in Michigan marked the last leg of a lonely, one-man war he launched earlier in the election to appeal to working-class and white rural voters, whom senior Clinton staffers reportedly told him were not worth the time or effort. [snip]

Further, there was a major difference between how Bill Clinton and the rest of his wife’s team approached discussing the economy. As Hillary Clinton, Obama and others campaigned on the message that economic fortunes have improved greatly since 2008, and that they’ll only get better with another Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton was telling voters things have been extremely difficult for working Americans, and that those people need extra encouragement and help.

The only surrogate who came close to echoing Bill Clinton’s efforts was Bernie Sanders, who performed well with working-class voters during the Democratic primary. [snip]

For Hillary Clinton’s chief strategists, the unique challenge of reconciling working-class and white rural frustrations with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy proved too difficult a riddle, and they chose in the end to focus their efforts elsewhere, much to Bill Clinton’s reported protestation.

The former president saw early during the Democratic primary that his wife had a real problem connecting with these voters, many of whom overwhelmingly preferred Sanders’ message on jobs and trade.

Bill Clinton reportedly warned the campaign that they needed to address the issue immediately, but “his advice fell on deaf ears,” according to the New York Times.

Hillary Clinton’s 36-year-old campaign manager, Robby Mook, dismissed the advice of the 70-year-old former president as the ravings of an aged athlete desperate to regain his former glory, and insisted instead that young, Latino and black voters were the key to winning 2016. [snip]

Mook, who was tapped to manage the Clinton campaign in 2015, came to the Democratic nominee with a resume filled with wins and losses.

In 2002, he worked as a field director for Doug Racine’s failed gubernatorial campaign in Vermont. Mook then worked in 2004 as a deputy field director for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s failed Democratic primary campaign. Later that year, he joined the Democratic National Committee and headed get out the vote efforts in Wisconsin for then-Sen. John Kerry’s, D-Mass., failed presidential campaign. [snip]

In 2005, things started to look up for the young politico. [snip]

By the spring of 2016, Mook’s influence was such that senior staffers sided with him against the Democratic nominee’s husband.

The Clinton team never named a rural council, ignoring both the warnings of the former president and Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign strategies, and had only one “staffer in Brooklyn” dedicated to rural outreach, Politico noted.

That staffer was not even tapped for that assignment until the final weeks of the election, the report added.

But as the campaign ignored Bill Clinton’s advice on courting working-class and rural whites, Bill Clinton ignored the campaign’s assessment that those voters weren’t worth the effort.

The aging ex-commander in chief decided to go it alone, and launched a personal campaign to win the ignored Americans in small, rural towns and cities across the Rust Belt and the South.

Bill Clinton’s remarks in Lansing two days before the election were no mistake, and, in his mind, it was not an off-script moment. For America’s 42nd president, who spoke at more than 60 campaign rallies, reaching out to these discarded voters became an increasingly crucial issue.

“In the final weeks of the campaign, a despondent Mr. Clinton held a flurry of his own events in Ohio, Iowa, the Florida Panhandle and Wisconsin, talking to the white voters who like him but who view his wife with distrust,” the New York Times reported.

When Bill Clinton spoke on the campaign trail about the voting bloc ignored by Mook and other senior staffers, he argued repeatedly that, as a white Southerner, he felt their pain.

He did this sometimes in unflattering terms, but usually from a place of self-deprecating humor.

“The other guy’s base is what I grew up in,” he said in October during a campaign stop in Fort Myers, Fla. “You know, I’m basically your standard redneck.”

His comments came as part of a larger appeal to his audience to reach out to undecided voters, especially pro-Trump supporters, and tell them the Democratic nominee understands and cares. [snip]

“I know how they feel,” he added in reference to angry and frustrated voters, many of whom gravitated toward Trump. “And I’m telling you, the older you get, the worse it is if … you think you can’t do anything to change the future.”

On the exact opposite side of things, Hillary Clinton handed the GOP and its supporters a rallying cry in September when she claimed at a fundraiser in New York City that “half” of Trump’s supporters were “irredeemable” bigots. [snip]

Despite these polarizing remarks, Hillary Clinton’s husband fought right up to the end to convince white working-class and rural voters that the Democratic nominee, who never once campaigned in Wisconsin, understood their concerns.

He failed.

Bill Clinton’s best efforts could not catch the Trump campaign, which hammered away relentlessly on key economic issues, including lost jobs, falling wages and outsourcing.

Hillary Clinton went on to lose in a big way to her Republican opponent. To the shock of politicos and media, Trump even emulated Bill Clinton’s success in the Rust Belt.

By early Wednesday morning, it became clear that the billionaire businessman was going to be the next president of the United States. Clinton conceded the election in a private phone call shortly after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Trump.

Hillary supporter Ed Rendell also tried to convince Hillary2016 and the Mook to speak to the white working class along with blacks and other groups of the Obama situation comedy. “We had the resources to do both. The campaign — and this was coming from Brooklyn — didn’t want to do it.”

The Democrats’ stunning defeat in the presidential race and continued struggles in lower-level contests have jolted party leaders into concluding that their emphasis on cultural issues has all but crippled them by diverting voters’ attention from the core Democratic message of economic fairness. [snip]

Over President Obama’s two terms, Democrats have embraced a down-the-line cultural liberalism that energized his coalition of millennials, minorities and college-educated whites. But the growing nationalization of politics and the Democrats’ drift to the left doomed a number of candidates running in more conservative states during the 2014 midterm elections, when turnout fell.

Yet despite their near-extinction in much of the South and in parts of the Great Plains — two regions that had for decades elected Democrats to statewide office — the party had little in the way of a debate about Mr. Obama’s approach.

Now, without rebuking the still-popular president directly, there is a growing recognition among many Democrats that Mr. Obama’s way may not be the best course in a country where many voters have experienced little income growth and where high-paying jobs can be scarce.

#Hillary2016 lost to Hillary2008. Enter Mark Penn, the pollster who was loyal to Hillary Clinton in 2008 and was dumped in favor of Obama acolyte Joel Benenson. Mark Penn laments 2016’s election results even as he sticks the knife into Hillary Clinton:

The Hillary Clinton of 2000 would have beaten Donald Trump

It was a sunny day on Daniel Moynihan’s farm in July 1999 when Hillary Clinton first launched her own political career and months later she would officially announce her candidacy for the U.S. Senate as a New Democrat. She extolled the values of “opportunity, community, responsibility and enterprise.”

In her announcement, Hillary backed a balanced budget, investments in education, welfare reform, tougher child support measures, more police and even teacher testing. She stressed the need for new jobs for New York and for continued economic progress.

She launched a campaign that was aimed at the largely Republican working class voters of upstate New York. It’s central promise was that no child should have to leave their hometown to find a good job.

She explained that the way to overcome the march of technology and globalization was to modernize the region for the 21st century. It was the kind of optimistic view of the future and the economy that got Bill Clinton elected in 1992. [snip]

Looking back, she accomplished a reverse Trump. She courted and won Republican leaning working class voters in economically depressed areas of the state. She became their champion. [snip]

Now let’s fast forward to the Hillary of 2016. Gone were references to the basic values of a limited government. Gone were proposals for teacher testing and more cops. She apologized for her Iraq vote; her national security resume now relied on her sitting in the situation room during the raid on Osama bin Laden, hardly an act of political courage.

She opposed the very trade deals she negotiated, called in effect for single payer health care and made no bones about proposing to raise taxes $1.5 trillion. Confronted with a challenge from the left, she made her peace with them by agreeing to back the most “progressive” agenda in the democratic party’s history. Even President Clinton’s crime bill was thrown overboard.

Bernie Sanders was a tough opponent, but he was no Barack Obama. She could have defeated him without the fade to the left that brought cries of inauthenticity and underscored her weaknesses. Few believed she was against TPP and her shift leftward didn’t win her many of the caucuses she lost in 2008. [snip]

In the general election, she abandoned the vital center and instead ran as a continuation of President Obama, wrongly believing that the country wanted a third term. While some polling dubiously placed Obama’s approval rating as high as 55%, nearly every poll showed 60 to 70 per cent saying the country was headed in the wrong direction.

Her closing campaign picture in Philadelphia said it all — she stood together with President Clinton, President Obama and Hollywood stars. An entire closing weekend surrounded by Hollywood and the past. [snip]

By moving to the left, the Democratic Party has increasingly isolated itself and lost voters at all levels of government from the state houses to now the White House. The last time the party became this isolated, Bill Clinton ran as a “different kind of Democrat.”

At this point in our analysis we enter the final refuge of the infants. Shocked and surprised Hillary Clinton supporters unable to refute our analysis thus far take shelter in the Kindergarten of the blame game. Enter the Comey and Bernie excuses.

The Comey excuse made by the infants is that the FBI screwed Hillary. That is laughable. Hillary Clinton and Hillary2016, as Wikileaks demonstrates were all very aware of the problems with Hillary’s emails. A Google search brings up enough evidence about Cheryl Mills and the mess of the emails that proves Hillary2016 knew the emails were enough of a problem that perhaps Hillary should not have run for president. To us the final nail that buries this line of argument is that whatever the pros and cons, innocence or guilt of Hillary Clinton on the emails, the Hillary2016 campaign with thousands of employees and [b]millions of dollars failed to effectively respond to the email issue. The blame is not with the FBI nor Comey, the blame falls on the lumbering mess called Hillary2016.

Which brings us to Bernie Sanders. Sanders did Hillary Clinton a solid when he did not exploit the email issue. But that is not enough for Hillary2016’s gulled supporters shocked by the results of the election. They blame Bernie Sanders for moving Hillary too far to the left and other sins. The case against that Socialist old coot is made by Trump hater/Hillary apologist Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek:

In the real world, here is what happened: Clinton got 16.9 million votes in the primaries, compared with 13.2 million for Sanders. The rules were never changed to stop him, even though Sanders supporters started calling for them to be changed as his losses piled up.

2. The Myth That Sanders Would Have Won Against Trump

It is impossible to say what would have happened under a fictional scenario, but Sanders supporters often dangle polls from early summer showing he would have performed better than Clinton against Trump. They ignored the fact that Sanders had not yet faced a real campaign against him. Clinton was in the delicate position of dealing with a large portion of voters who treated Sanders more like the Messiah than just another candidate. She was playing the long game—attacking Sanders strongly enough to win, but gently enough to avoid alienating his supporters. Given her overwhelming support from communities of color—for example, about 70 percent of African-American voters cast their ballot for her—Clinton had a firewall that would be difficult for Sanders to breach.

Let’s stop right there. Did Hillary Clinton learn anything from 2008? No. Stupid. In 2008 Hillary avoided an attack to devastate Obama because she wanted to “avoid alienating his supporters”. In 2008 Obama supporters treated Obama “more like the Messiah than just another candidate. She learned nothing from 2008. The same exact problems from 2008 and the same stupidity from Hillary Clinton and Hillary2016.

When Sanders promoted free college tuition—a primary part of his platform that attracted young people—that didn’t mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don’t attend—or even plan to attend—plan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college students—the people with even greater opportunities in life—were at the top of his priority list.

Pardon the interruption, why didn’t Hillary2016 and Hillary Clinton denounce Bernie Sanders instead of mimicking him??? As in 2008, Hillary Clinton did not attack her idiot opponent, preferring to become a parrot. Again, Hillary Clinton stupidly did not learn a thing from 2008.

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

The idiot Kurt Eichenwald thinks he helps Hillary Clinton and Hillary2016 with this drivel???? To our minds this defense is the ultimate condemnation!!!

If the Republicans had this opposition research book of horrors against Sanders WHY THE HELL DIDN’T HILLARY2016??? Why? We discussed and developed a strategy against Socialist Bernie which included questions about why he left Brooklyn for Vermont and those articles about women rape fantasies. Why didn’t Hillary2016 do what we suggested or develop a better strategy against the old coot. Because Hillary2016 was the dumbest, stupidest, campaign we have ever seen.

STUPID. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.

The campaign of Donald J. Trump? Brilliant. With less staff, less money, less organizational/institutional allies, more enemies in the form of the GOP establishment, European governments willing to surrender the West, the Dem Party, Big Media, Big Money, and Big Labor – Trump prevailed.

From the very first day, Donald J. Trump spoke clear, concise, English. The voters, trapped in a snake pit, used Donald J. Trump as a stick to beat back the snakes. That’s why Donald J. Trump is President-elect Donald J. Trump. He deserved to win.

Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in last week’s election, while Democratic control was reduced to levels not seen since the Civil War.

Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

“That’s more than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party,” according to NCSL. “They also hold more total seats, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920.”

Next year, the GOP will control both legislative chambers in 32 states – an all-time high, according to NCSL – while Democrats will have total control of just 13 state legislatures.

In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors. In contrast, Democrats have a “political trifecta” in just six states.

Since 2009, when President Obama took office, his party has lost a total of 919 seats in state legislatures nationwide, according to NCSL data.

In 2009, Democrats had total control of 27 state legislatures, and held a majority in at least one chamber in eight more states where power was divided. In contrast, Republicans controlled just 14 state legislatures.

During Obama’s first year in office, Democrats held 1,024 of the 1,971 total state Senate seats in the nation, compared to 889 in Republican hands. They also held 3,058 of the total 5,411 state House seats, compared to 2,334 for Republicans.

In addition, there were 28 Democratic governors, compared to 22 Republican governors.

However, near the end of Obama’s two terms in office, the partisan balance in the nation’s state legislatures has been completely reversed.

As of Nov. 7, 2016, there are just 823 Democratic state senators out of a total of 1,972 seats nationwide, according to NCSL data. Meanwile, Republicans have increased their ranks to 1,089.

Likewise, of the 5,411 state House seats, there are now 3,029 Republicans compared to 2,340 Democrats – a mirror image of both parties’ status in 2009.

The Democrats’ prior advantage in the nation’s governors’ mansions when Obama took office has also been lost. There are currently 31 Republican governors, 18 Democratic governors and one Independent (Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska).

“Republicans grabbed more of America’s statehouses and governors’ mansions during the Obama administration than at any time in the modern era,” the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips reported.

Last week’s historic flip of the Kentucky House – the last Democrat-controlled legislative chamber in the South – to Republican hands for the first time in nearly 100 years underscores the point.

In 2010, Democrats in the Kentucky House held a solid 65-35 majority. Six years later, the GOP now has a supermajority, and will control 62 of the chamber’s 100 seats.

“Democrats are now basically extinct in the South,” Phillips noted.

“Republicans bested expectations,” said Dan Diorio, a policy expert at NCSL. “Having already reached the peak of control in party history, Republicans will maintain a similar level of control in a year when many expected Democrats to net seats and chambers.”

”Anyone who said that Donald Trump was going to be a drag on down-ticket races is certainly eating their words right now,” Lisa Nelson, CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) told CNSNews.com.

“When I talk to the states, most of them say they picked up state Senate or House seats because of Donald Trump. And I think that’s because of the forgotten man or woman people are talking about, who hadn’t shown up to vote in the past.”

Three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th U.S. president, attorneys for Barack Obama’s outgoing administration will ask an appeals court to revive rules governing oil-and-gas fracking on federal land.

Even if Obama wins, the victory would likely be short-lived.

Trump’s “highest advisers generally agree with our side of the lawsuit,” said Mark S. Barron, a lawyer for trade groups that joined Wyoming and three other states seeking to overturn the restrictions that they contend would unduly restrict energy companies’ use of hydraulic fracturing. “The Bureau of Land Management hasn’t identified a single incident or problem that this federal rule would have prevented. The fact of the matter is fracking is regulated pretty heavily under state law.”

The president-elect has promised to boost the economy in part by scuttling regulations introduced under Obama. High-profile court cases over rules related to health care, the environment and the financial industry may become moot in January when both the executive and legislative branches come under control of the Republican Party, which has been hostile to them. Still, the process of reversing the policies won’t be easy.

“I don’t think the entire Obama legacy is going to be undone in a month, but there’s a chance for some pretty substantial chipping away of his hallmark legislation,” said Christoper Walker, who teaches constitutional litigation at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. “A fair amount of these rules could be unwound pretty quickly.” [snip]

Here’s a look at some other suits and rules that may be upended under Trump’s administration.

The Environmental Protection Agency last year enacted the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and slow global warming. It’s likely on the chopping block as Trump has called global warming a hoax. Bolstered by mining interests and power companies, 27 states sued to overturn the CPP. A Washington court heard arguments in the case in September.

“It is our hope that the regulation will be withdrawn after Donald Trump takes office,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement. “That should preclude the need for further litigation, but we will need to discuss the mechanics with the new administration to determine how we will proceed.”

Another long-running battle that’s likely to fade is a suit by 15 states over EPA rules for mercury and other power-plant pollutants. The Supreme Court sided with the states when the late Justice Antonin Scalia faulted the agency for failing to do a cost-benefit analysis. After the EPA did one, the states sued again. The case may be over if Trump changes the rules.
Wetlands

Judges in Cincinnati are considering a 31-state challenge to expanding the Clean Water Act to include dry creek beds, prairie wetlands and other areas. Last year, the appeals court put those rules on hold. On Dec. 8, it will hear arguments about whether to retain them.

“We have a host of cases pending against the federal government due to the Obama administration’s overreach,” said Jennifer Speller, a spokeswoman for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. “We will continue to pursue all of these cases and look forward to working with a new administration.”
Finance

Trump’s transition team last week said it planned to dismantle the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, calling it “a sprawling and complex piece of legislation that has unleashed hundreds of new rules and several new bureaucratic agencies.” That may mean the end of the Financial Stability Oversight Board, a panel of U.S. financial agency heads that decides which firms are systemically important to the nation’s economy, known as “too big to fail.”

MetLife Inc., one of four non-banks to bear the label, won a federal court ruling in March rescinding the designation. The U.S. appealed. Trump’s administration could withdraw the appeal and allow the lower-court ruling to stand if the panel hasn’t yet ruled.

Another Dodd-Frank agency that could be affected is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month, a federal appeals court threw out a $109 million penalty the CFPB slapped on PHH Corp., a New Jersey mortgage company. The judges said the agency had violated the company’s rights but refused to abolish the bureau, as the company had requested. Trump could do that regardless of whether the Obama administration appeals.
Retirement Planning

The Labor Department this year announced rules compelling those who dispense retirement-planning advice to put client interests ahead of their own, sparking at least a half-dozen suits. One, filed in a Washington federal court by the National Association for Fixed Annuities, was thrown out on Nov. 4. Arguments in a related case are set for Thursday in Dallas.

“We’re very hopeful that after Trump is inaugurated that he will move to kill the DOL rule,” said NAFA Executive Director Chip Anderson.
Health Care

Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, has long been marked for death by Republican opponents, even as Trump has signaled he may retain some elements of it. The House Republican leadership successfully sued in 2014 to block the administration from paying for portions of the plan. Obama appealed, but it won’t matter if Trump scuttles most of Obamacare.

There was little the Clinton operatives could . . . faulting the campaign for failing to develop a credible message for downscale white voters, arguing she could have won by a larger margin on the economy.
——–
The minute she said I will be Obama III is the minute that became impossible.

The core message of Obama I and II was fuck down scale white voters–they are racist, sexist, xenophopobic, live in small towns, are Christian, etc.

Any serious outreach “downscale” (by the way, that term is dripping with condescension) would have required a repudiation of the core message of Obama.

That was something we hoped she would do, but instead she embraced the racist elitist bigot Obama.

If Bill Clinton could not get through to her on that critical point, I fail to see where the callow Mook could have.

Under the asupicies of a “new democrat” she could have made the same argument Trump did in re. the black community.

How far did NBC go in the tank for the sake of cultural marxism, i.e. making white people the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong–something we would call scapegoating if we were talking about Nazi Germany.

I have a two word answer:

White Hispanic—they had to turn a case of self defense into a racial incident and blame it on whitey.

And they have the unmitigated gall to call Trump supporters racist?

Of course.

It is a function of the same neo Nazi throught process of racial scapegoating.

Big media has no legitimate raison de etra.

That NYT non mea culpa statement saying that having lost their attempt to destroy candidate Trump

While swaddling the democrat candidate, who they threw overboard eight years ago for their wet dream Obama

Now promise, solemnly, they they will return to the objective journalism they are known for

This reminds me of Churchill’s rejoinder when someone invoked the majestic traditions of the Royal Navy

He pointed out that ever since the Battle of Trafalgar the British Navy had but three traditions

Rum, the lash, and sodomy.

The same can be said of NYT.

Therefore, when they wax eloquent about returning the objective journalism they are famous for

All that can possibly mean is they will go from a shill for Obama, to an attack dog against Trump.

Simply put, they lack the ability to be objective, so who are they trying to kid?

er closing campaign picture in Philadelphia said it all — she stood together with President Clinton, President Obama and Hollywood stars. An entire closing weekend surrounded by Hollywood and the past. [snip]
——-
Better there than Martha’s Vineyard.

As W.C. Fields headstone reads: “All things considered, I would rather be here than in Philadelphia.”

From the Vineyard, to the City of Brotherly Love, to the political graveyard, in the short space of 60 days.

I am glad that Hillary’s campaign was run in the manner that it was. If she had acted like the champion of the white working class, I would have still voted TRUMP. Hillary is not trustworthy. She is a liar, and her words would have meant nothing to me. During the Obama administration, she supported his agenda which was proof that she would have been the third term of Obama. I could never support that. In fact, due to the behavior of the Democratic Party as a whole with all their race baiting, lying, social engineering, anti-white attitudes, among other negative qualities, I will NEVER vote for any Democrat again, and I am serious about that.

The two Democrat candidates I followed more than any others, Hillary and Katie of PA, had a bad habit of lying about something very simple. The said Donald would raise taxes and mess with Social Security and Medicare. Ridiculous claims which he denied at every rally. I put in a request for rebuttal to a local I-Reporter who indicated willingness to tackle. But his affirmative reply disappeared within 12 hours of its appearance.

At some point, I’d like to see pressure brought to bear upon TV channels who earn money from lies. I’ve had my own little post card campaign targeting one Scranton channel. Alas the only small indication I have that it’s made a difference is that one of their anchors just took early retirement.

I love the Administrator of this website. You are so astute and so smart and for me (and probably most here) you are the voice of reason. I have been grounded more here than by any conservative website (and I visit a lot of them). I was confident to call this election for Trump at 8:30pm CST because of what I read here, although I was also boosted by the primarymodel.com which made a lot of sense. I thought Romney would pull it off so my track record isn’t so great. My husband was holding out but I stood firm. I was confident because this website wasn’t naming any “mistakes” by Trump whereas Romney had a big one (Ryan). I’ve been reading since ’08, a Republican, our mutual disdain for Obama brought me here. The R’s are a huge disappointment as everyone knows. I have yuuuge hope with Trump, it’s a new day! Not to mention it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Tony Stark
November 17, 2016 at 7:57 pm
———————
What he really needs to be sent is the bill for all his big talk. That would stop him right in his tracks. The average cost of raising a child is around $250,000.

This article says Obama won’t call the hoodlums off because he is spiteful… I’m not sure that’s it – or at least not all of it – I think it’s mostly because he’s afraid they won’t listen to him and stop their destruction and theft, and he would look foolish. And I think he’s right – I don’t think they would listen to him. And I don’t think they would listen to Hillary.

Lu, Tony – I know sometimes it’s helpful to do something brazen to get someone’s attention, but this particular stunt is not going to have any positive effect, sheesh.

I don’t like the idea of later abortions, but I don’t have a problem with early ones. Someone like Pence I think is going by their religion and saying that “life” starts at conception – but of course, it’s all about the presumed specialness of humans. Even a little cell that has the potential to develop into a creature is important IF it’s a human it would develop into. I get it, that’s their choice to believe that, but they don’t seem to understand others don’t choose that belief system. Again, I don’t like later abortions, but I don’t attach any specialness to a clump of cells.

What I really don’t get is how they don’t factor in the human destruction of coat hanger abortions – OR what will happen if all women who don’t want to be pregnant are forced to carry it. They’ll be drinking, smoking, doing drugs, eating crap all while pregnant. Good chance they’ll have a kid with learning disorders or addicted. And of course we already have too many kids needing to be adopted, but they probably would keep the kid, for the welfare probably. And be terrible, terrible, parents.

And I have read research that lower income parents who are bad parents (ie, not all lower income parents) do not stimulate their children – no mobiles dangling over their head, no talking to the babies, no reading to the infants and toddlers. The kids develop into someone with very poor language skills. And what’s worse, I’ve heard that it can lead to some neurons not developing or connecting (sorry, maybe Tony knows what I’m trying to say, that’s the best I remember/understood), and the child may grow up incapable of EVER developing empathy. So right there you’ve got anti-social kids being popped out and NONnurtured…

How is that promoting respect for life or quality of life, etc? And it certainly isn’t promoting a good life for those of us who have to share the world with these kids who grow up to be problem people….

Lorac,
Don’t get me wrong. I grew up in a Catholic country and saw my share of back alley abortions as a med student and as an intern before I immigrated to the US. I do support legal abortion, but IMHO what that loon is proposing (sending menstrual blood to Pence) is just disgusting and very counterproductive to winning support for keeping abortion legal in this country.

lorac
November 18, 2016 at 1:20 am
———————————————
The Philippines. I moved to the US a few years after the popular revolt that overthrew the dictator President Ferdinand Marcos. At the time, Bill Clinton was a breath of fresh air, but little did I know that Obama’s administration would feel even worse than living under that dictator.

Tony – oh, shoot, I work with a lot of Filipinas and I had them teach me something, and now I can’t remember it… something about “…something something something disturbo”… I’ll have to relearn it.. I asked them to teach me how to say, “leave me alone!” lol

Ferdinand Marcos – was he the guy with the wife who had thousands of shoes?

sample of this awesome piece:
First, I want to go over Donald Trump’s official, explicit campaign message. Yes, it’s possible for candidates’ secret feelings to differ from their explicit messages, but the things they say every single day and put on their website and include in their speeches are still worth going over to see what image they want to project.

Trump’s official message has been the same vague feel-good pro-diversity rhetoric as any other politician. Here’s Trump on African Americans:

It is my highest and greatest hope that the Republican Party can be the home in the future and forevermore for African-Americans and the African-American vote because I will produce, and I will get others to produce, and we know for a fact it doesn’t work with the Democrats and it certainly doesn’t work with Hillary.

When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally. Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child in America?

African-American citizens have sacrificed so much for this nation. They have fought and died in every war since the Revolution, and from the pews and the picket lines they have lifted up the conscience of our country in the long march for Civil Rights. Yet, too many African-Americans have been left behind.

No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton’s policies than African-Americans. No group. No group. If Hillary Clinton’s goal was to inflict pain on the African-American community, she could not have done a better job. It’s a disgrace. Tonight, I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen in this country who wants a better future.

And at the end of four years I guarantee that I will get over 95% of the African-American vote. I promise you. Because I will produce for the inner-cities and I will produce for the African-Americans.

———–
Intelligent People Have One Thing in Common, According to Research

What are the habits of intelligent people? Reading? Chess? Solving world problems? Not quite, according to research. In fact, there’s only one common habit that science has found regarding intelligent people and it’s not what you think.

According to a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science, IQ average and sleeping patterns are the most definitely related, and they’ve proven that those who stay up later are more intelligent human beings.

Satoshi Kanazaw ran the study on young Americans and through data analysis, proved that intelligent people were more likely to be night owls than their less intelligent counterparts. Here’s the data:

Yup, his wife Imelda had quite a collection of shoes. Both of them used the Philippine treasury as their personal piggy bank, and she would fly to New York with her closest friends and have Bloomingdales closed to the public so she could go shopping.

A British woman facing jail for extra-marital sex after reporting an alleged gang rape on holiday in Dubai has told of her “nightmare” and said she’s “petrified”.

Zara-Jayne Moisey, 25, told police in the United Arab Emirates she was violently raped by two British men in the city last month.

But instead of being treated as a victim, Zara, from Widnes, who is single after splitting from her husband, was reportedly locked up on suspicion of extra-marital sex and later charged with the offence.

Her passport has been confiscated and she now faces a trial, claim her family and friends.

Drug cartels operatives try to get jobs as U.S. border agents. Sometimes they do. Federal agents crossing the line
——-
Which is further confirmation that Messiah Obama is an equal opportunity employer.

And is willing to push all such issues, even if people get killed.

Every day, another brick is laid, in his enduring legacy.

When most of his executive orders get rescinded, nothing of substance will be left.

Except for the enduring love of big media which passeth all understanding.

Update: All we wrote starting in 2007 about the disaster of the Obama situation comedy “coalition” and that it would lead to the destruction of the Democratic Party is now confirmed. We attacked the demographic fantasies and delusions woven by John Judis (who eventually was forced by reality to recant) and Ruy Teixeira, which led to the Obama nomination, as madness. By 2015 we prevailed with our analysis and Judis rewrote the “emerging Democratic majority” into “the emerging Republican advantage“. We were correct. Hillary2016 would not listen to our warnings (“Hillary Clinton 2016 take note of the Mistake in ’08 and don’t repeat them or get tied to them in 2016. Matt Bai regurgitates what we wrote years ago:

Democrats lost because for a while now they’ve been telling themselves a story about modern politics. [snip]

This particular story goes all the way back to 2002, when the writers Ruy Teixeira and John Judis published an influential book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” At a time when Democrats were dispirited, Teixeira and Judis argued, presciently, that the country’s demographics were evolving in ways that would ultimately favor their candidates. [snip]

Basically, the party’s leading funders and operatives decided that they didn’t have to pander to white people living outside of cities anymore, because with each passing year their voters were cementing a new majority and redrawing the electoral map. [snip]

Barack Obama’s two elections seemed to them to validate this new Democratic math. [snip]

And so this was Hillary’s driving theory of the race. [snip] She ran on a database, rather than on an argument; [snip]

But the Cult of Demography was built on some very flawed assumptions. [snip]

The second problem is that even if you buy that a Democrat can maximize turnout among minorities and the already converted, it doesn’t mean you can simply forget about everyone else. [snip]

According to excellent reporting by the New York Times’ Amy Chozick, no less a strategist than Bill Clinton himself argued to his wife’s campaign command that she, too, needed to speak to white working-class voters. No one listened. They were all about the database. [snip]

It assumes that Republicans can’t field a candidate who appeals to some larger segment of black or Latino voters, a third of whom voted Republican this year.

It assumes, too, that younger voters don’t grow more ideologically diverse as they age.

The two-time White House hopeful, former Fox New Channel weekend host and former governor of Arkansas will be America’s next ambassador to Israel, a presidential transition official confirmed to DailyMail.com on Friday. He is scheduled to meet with President-Elect Donald Trump Friday at 2:00 p.m.

Huckabee, an ordained Baptist preacher and electric bass player, will become the tip of Trump’s spear as he seeks to shake up U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East, beginning with relocating America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

‘That’s going to happen,’ the transition official said. ‘Governor Huckabee is going to see it through.’

Despite congressional approval for the move, American leaders have historically tap-danced around the issue of where in Israel America’s diplomatic footprint should fall. No other nation has its embassy in Jerusalem.

Still, Israel’s Knesset and Supreme Court are located in West Jerusalem. And the nation captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 ‘Six-Day War,’ taking control of it from Jordan.

A 1980 Israeli law still in force declares that ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.’

Arab nations near Israel oppose the idea of making Jerusalem a center of power for the Jewish state. Many of them deny Israel’s right to exist at all, and most see Jerusalem as a holy city for Muslims.

Huckabee met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year in Jerusalem and angered Palestinians by calling the West Bank part of Israel

Huckabee greeted reporters as he entered Trump Tower on Friday, joking that he was ‘just here for the Starbucks’

However, I cannot help noticing how the better he gets, the more big media hates him, and looks for any possible objection they can find to his nominees.

I think we have reached a point with them where we need to make peace. The kind they deserve–a Carthaginian peace, where you pour salt over there land so nothing grows there for 100 years. Without access, they die.

Here is Larry’s take on General Flynn, which concurs with my own. In many ways, he was the architect of certain facets of the Trump campaign, although the public does not know it. The word I would use to describe him is superb.

(Note: I hope Sheriff Clark gets Homeland Security).

The one other point I would make, Admin., is that these three appointments show that Trump has resisted moves by RINO boarding parties to secrete themselves into his administration with false claims that we were with you all along, etc. This was the risk that Ed Rollins and Roger Stone separately identified as the most critical decision a president elect can make at this point, a decision that can become outcome determinative for his presidency.

For press secretary, I would look for someone like Don Rickels who would give the big media press corps the respect they deserve.
————

Donald Trump already is running laps around the pathetic Barack Obama. His reported selection of retired General Mike Flynn as his National Security Advisor is a coup. I know General Flynn from his time at JSOC and then followed his work as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Mike Flynn is a genuine professional.

He hits the ground without needing to learn the ropes. He knows the damn ropes. He knows the role that the NSC is supposed to play in crisis response operations, such as Benghazi. He knows the intelligence process and, more importantly in my book, he knows how much of the intelligence community has been politicized and corrupted by Barack Obama and his stooges.

I saw first hand how Mike Flynn’s DIA pushed back against the public narrative on Syria in the 2012-2013 time period. If you listened to the Obama propaganda as well as the message being pushed by the neocon community you were led to believe that the Syrian rebels were a potent military force and were winning the day against the Syrian Government. But that was not the story that DIA was reporting. I’m told that General Flynn came under intense pressure to be a team player and to shade the facts. He refused.

It was his refusal to cave to political pressure in reporting intelligence facts that ultimately led to his firing. It was not because of incompetence. It was because he refused to surrender his integrity.

If Flynn continues to conduct himself in this manner as Trump’s senior foreign policy and national security advisor, America will be safe. Obama has been surround by clowns. Trump has now, reportedly, surrounded himself with class in one critical position.

Where that press secretary is concerned, it would be important for him or her to have the wiklikeaks data on who the jurnolisters where, and to guide his press conferences accordingly. I would not call on them when they raise their hands, and I would give them hell when they asked their have you stopped beating your wife questions. I might even get personal–attack them–and say I was just kidding. I would taunt them on the record about their their faustian pacts with the prior administration–and when they got puffy I would say something folksy like ah come on I was just funnin you.

The press corps I have observed is a motley crew, who inspire little or no confidence in the close observer. One thing that does happen however is when the Obama spokesman fires a load of buckshot they scatter like scared deer. At that point, the one guy who steps forward to defend the phony majesty of the fourth estate is Mike Lee now of the AP. He acts like the adult in the room. However, wikileaks shows that he too was an Obama shill. Therefore, when he takes the floor to defend the indefensible, the new press secretary allude to this, the same way a good cross examiner confronts a hostile witness, when he has impeachment stuff at hand. This is the only way to keep dishonest people honest. (Note: personally, I knew there was something political that explained Mike Lee’s rise from lowly blogger to white house reporter for the AP, and wikileaks explains it. What makes him more artful is he does not seem to be a journolister, even though he is.)

One other piece of the puzzle: Trump had to beat 15 other people, to become the nominee. Hillary barely had any competition. She was not well served by the super delegates declaring her the winner long before the actual primaries. If she’d had more competition, she might have been able to adjust her message. But really, she had no message.

I knew it would take a Republican candidate that could win without big media’s help. None of the other Republican candidates could have done that. And you can really see the benefits now. Just keep the media in the dark and announce things through your own channels.

As far as that lady sending menstrual blood to Pence, she can be and will be arrested if she does it. Blood is a biohazard and can carry disease, thus the need for special handling. Do it lady. I’ll get some popcorn and laugh when you get arrested.

Can’t help but be a little down with all this anti-Trump protesting and non-stop bitching by the media. When is it going to stop. Schools letting children out to protest and it goes on and on. It’s been 9 days out from the election and it’s just as bad as day one.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Steve Bannon
“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff as the controversial Breitbart News chief turned White House advisor unleashes on Hillary Clinton, Fox News and his critics.
In late summer when I went up to see Steve Bannon, recently named CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, in his office at Trump Tower in New York, he outlined a preposterous-sounding scenario. Trump, he said, would do surprisingly well among women, Hispanics and African-Americans, in addition to working men, and hence take Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and therefore the election. On Nov. 15, when I went back to Trump Tower, Bannon, promoted by the president-elect to chief strategist for the incoming administration, and by the media as the official symbol of all things hateful and virulent about the coming Trump presidency, said, as matter-of-factly as when he first sketched it out for me, “I told you so.”

The liberal firewall against Trump was, most of all, the belief that the Republican contender was too disorganized, outlandish, outré and lacking in nuance to run a proper political campaign. That view was only confirmed when Bannon, editor of the outlandish and outré Breitbart News Network, took over the campaign in August. Now Bannon is arguably the most powerful person on the new White House team, embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury: How did someone so wrong — not just wrong, but inappropriate, unfit and “loathsome,” according to The New York Times — get it so spot-on right?

In this dark day for Democrats, Bannon has become the blackest hole.

“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

On that precise point, the New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of “disarray” for the transition team. In fact, it’s all hands on: Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and by many accounts his closest advisor, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: “Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?”), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it’s a peculiarly focused and organized kind.

Anti-Bannon protesters in L.A.
READ MORE
Protesters Call on Donald Trump to Dump Steve Bannon
It’s the Bannon theme, the myopia of the media, that it tells only the story that confirms its own view, that in the end it was incapable of seeing an alternative outcome and of making a true risk assessment of the political variables — reaffirming the Hillary Clinton camp’s own political myopia. This defines the parallel realities in which liberals, in their view of themselves, represent a morally superior character and Bannon — immortalized on Twitter as a white nationalist, racist, anti-Semite thug — the ultimate depravity of Trumpism.

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth. A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School. Then it’s Goldman Sachs, then he’s a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune — then into the otherworld of the right wing conspiracy and conservative media. (He partners with David Bossie, a congressional investigator of President Clinton, who later spearheaded the Citizens United lawsuit that effectively removed the cap on campaign spending, and who now, as the deputy campaign manager, is in the office next to Bannon’s.) And then to the Breitbart News Network, which with digital acumen and a mind-meld with the anger and the passion of the new alt-right (a liberal designation Bannon derides) he pushes to the inner circle of conservative media from Breitbart’s base on the west side of liberal Los Angeles.

What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its working-man roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the long-time Clinton connection — Bill Clinton’s connection — to the working man. “The Clinton strength,” he says, “was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its working-man constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the working man was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.”

Stephen Bannon
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Anti-Defamation League Slams Donald Trump’s Appointment of Stephen Bannon
To say that he sees this donor class — which in his telling is also “ascendant America,” e.g. the elites, as well as “the metrosexual bubble” that encompasses cosmopolitan sensibilities to be found as far and wide as Shanghai, London’s Chelsea, Hollywood and the Upper West Side — as a world apart, is an understatement. In his view, there’s hardly a connection between this world and its opposite — fly-over America, left-behind America, downwardly mobile America — hardly a common language. This is partly why he regards the liberal characterization of himself as socially vile, as the politically incorrect devil incarnate, as laughable — and why he is stoutly unapologetic. They —liberals and media — don’t understand what he is saying, or why, or to whom. Breitbart, with its casual provocations — lists of its varied incitements (among them: the conservative writer David Horowitz referred to conservative pundit Brill Kristol as a “renegade Jew,” and the site delighting in headlines the likes of “Trannies 49Xs Higher HIV Rate” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”) were in hot exchange after the election among appalled Democrats — is as obtuse to the liberal-donor-globalist class as Lena Dunham might be to the out-of-work workingman class. And this, in the Bannon view, is all part of the profound misunderstanding that led liberals to believe that Donald Trump’s mouth would doom him, instead of elect him.

Bannon, arguably, is one of the people most at the battle line of the great American divide — and one of the people to have most clearly seen this battle line.

He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver—” by “we” he means the Trump White House “—we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

In a nascent administration that seems, at best, random in its beliefs, Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Stephen Bannon
READ MORE
Anti-Defamation League Slams Donald Trump’s Appointment of Stephen Bannon
Bannon represents, he not unreasonably believes, the fall of the establishment. The self-satisfied, in-bred and homogenous views of the establishment are both what he is against and what has provided the opening for the Trump revolution. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

At that moment, as we talk, there’s a knock on the door of Bannon’s office, a temporary, impersonal, middle-level executive space with a hodgepodge of chairs for constant impromptu meetings. Sen. Ted Cruz, once the Republican firebrand, now quite a small and unassuming figure, has been waiting patiently for a chat and Bannon excuses himself for a short while. It is clear when we return to our conversation that it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. “They got it more wrong than anybody,” he says. “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.” Bannon recounts, with no small irony, that when Breitbart attacked Kelly after her challenges to Trump in the initial Republican debate, Fox News chief Roger Ailes — whom Bannon describes as an important mentor, and who Kelly’s accusations of sexual harassment would help topple in July — called to defend her. Bannon says he warned Ailes that Kelly would be out to get him too.

It is less than obvious how Bannon, now the official strategic brains of the Trump operation, syncs with his boss, famously not too strategic. When Bannon took over the campaign from Paul Manafort, there were many in the Trump circle who had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the candidate listening to no one. But here too was a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump — even after the leak of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio — was speaking to ever-growing crowds of thirty-five or forty thousand. “He gets it, he gets it intuitively,” says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found such an ideal vessel. “You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”

Indeed, during the worst days of the campaign, even down to the last day when most in Trumpland thought only a miracle would save them, “I knew that she couldn’t close. They out-spent us ten to one, had ten times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”

Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus — in and out of Bannon’s office as we talk — as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision, goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end runs of a party significant parts of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.

“I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”

Relax and enjoy. We won…they lost. We don’t need their approval to move forward. The more they lie and throw temper tantrums, the more they drive people away. Let them go far, far, far left and they will become more and more unacceptable to most Americans.

wbboei
November 18, 2016 at 4:20 pm
scatter like scared deer
—–
boy my analogies are not working.
Buckshot is for ducks, not deer.

____________________________-

No, buckshot is for deer. You *could* shoot duck with buckshot, though I’ve never seen anyone do that, however it wouldn’t be a good idea. There are two reasons for this. First, the larger the shot, the fewer pellets are contained in the shotgun shell. You want as many pellets in the air as are large enough to effectively bring the bird down. The smaller the shot, the closer the bird must be because they lose velocity. Second, the larger the shot size, the more destructive the pellet is for the same reason – it has a higher velocity and impact. Accordingly, buckshot is never used because it is destructive of the meat and the “pattern” of the shot pellets in the air is not concentrated enough.

Obama needs to be tried as a Traitor, Trump needs to put pressure on Mexico and find support for the states, of which I live in one, Texas, on the border.
He should be tried for murder if anyone commits same that is found to have come across in last 2 months.
The money is there, this is his FU to America.

Also, Admin, you better be putting a book together from 2007 with your incredible insights, all your posts, some well thought out comments…it will be a best seller clearly!
You can have a picture of Hillary morphing into Obama, morphing back to Hillary, and finally morphing into Trump..
And I hope your applying for some well paying position on his Team…we need you, and so does he.

Recent tweets by Donald: Per @FoxNews, the 1 hour special tonight by @HarveyLevinTMZ at 10 PM ET, 7 PM PT, features a side of me “that has rarely been seen before.”
and
Will be working all weekend in choosing the great men and women who will be helping to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Retweets 11,705
Likes 47,978
and this compliation from Hannity:

blowme0bama
November 18, 2016 at 4:51 pm
——
I defer to your expertise.

But the idea of shooting, dressing, preserving, preparing and consuming venison riddled with buck shot is less than appealing to my plebian tastes. If it is high society stuff, then lets ask Meegain, provided she is not too busy grabbing opg–other people genitals on her book tour. What a loud mouth hypocritical asshole she is. Notice, I scrupulously avoided the word bitch, not because of pc, but because it is would be a euphemism in any description of her.

She played a key role in drafting the Uniform Commercial Code, which is a masterful body of work, that provides certainty, stability, and fairness in commercial transactions, and is one of the legal underpinnings of our economy.

Tony – I brought those two sentences to work, and people pronounced them for me. The one I learned was the first one – I didn’t realize it until it was pronounced. Now I remember I learned it by writing it down phonetically in my own little language lol Thanks again!

I wish I could post a picture here – I came upon one that cracked me up. It was Obama at the presidential desk, and next to him was standing a man. It’s the man who is the star of that tv show with the smart people – I can’t remember the name – I think maybe they live in the same apartment complex? I’ve never seen it, but I figure it’s like Friends but with smart people…? Oh – “Big Bang” I think it’s called. Anyway, the man is standing next to Obama and has his head down looking over at Obama, and the words at the bottom say,

“You’re in Trump’s spot”

See, the picture would have had a better effect – but it’s so cute lol

Tradition favors holding a Hawaiian luau on a Hawaiian Beach, with the trade winds and crashing surf in the background.

But sometimes, that is not possible.

Sometimes you have to improvise.

Shorn of tradition, all you need is a hot barbecue roasting pit, a fat greasy pig and an apple to shove in his mouth.

Tucker Carlson has the roasting pit and the fat greasy pig–a “journalist from The Hill”

Who, by his own admission, hates being a journalist and aspires to become a democrat party operative.

(Note: After he had been at Politico for about a month, we gave Allen what we thought would be good news: We wanted him to join us as a regular staff writer, with some extra money to boot. But Allen had other ideas and told us, to our dismay, that he was thinking of leaving journalism. After some more discussion, it became clear he was dreaming not merely of an exit from journalism but of an entrance into a new career as a Capitol Hill political operative.)

Normally in a luau you have to kill the pig, and drag it over to the spittle.

Here however this pig walks on stage and plots his fat ass at the conference table from Tucker Carlson.

And then the fun begins as he attempts to defend his article where he accuses Sessions by way of inuendo

Of being a KKK supporter, a hater of immigrants, a raging homophobe, a hater of children, etc.

And under close cross examination, he cannot defend one word of what he has said.

He is roasted alive.

The only thing missing was the apple.

And by the end of the interview they could have stuck down his fat gizzard because by then he was charred.

wbboei
November 18, 2016 at 11:32 pm
I had the pleasure of watching Allen live. And have watched the interview once again. His mask of virtue signaling drops completely when he goes off on Sessions not wanting the taxpayers of Alabama to have to shoulder the burden of “FEEDDIINNNGGG!!!! CHILLLLLDDDDREEEENNNN!!!!” of another country dropped into their laps by Obama. The very thought of food denied somehow drives him over the edge.

Of course the “Borking” of Sessions back in the ’80s was a practice run by Ted Kennedy for Bork. But alas Ted’s dead and Trump is not. The mau mauing of Sessions started last week. They ignored his pivotal role in Trump’s candidacy and thought him ridiculous. That is until Trump won then the long knives came out. They hoped and thus floated various trial balloons for Sec of State, etc. Nope. It’s Atty Gen and they have gone full mental. Sessions is beyond dangerous in that capacity. First off half of the DOJ will have to resign. The other half will have to follow the law. Professional ethics will make a comeback and “diversity” will be staff who went to law schools other than Harvard, Yale or Georgetown.

Trump’s transition team is already dropping stories of how Sessions desegregated AL schools, busted the KKK both civil and criminal and made sure the KKK head murderer was not just sentenced to death but really, really executed. The Senate Dems know they have to be careful or kill civility and comity in the Senate (Harry will be gone by Sessions confirmation) or Trump may go after them like he did the 16 stooges. They don’t seem to want to get their hands dirty thus the lying cheat and fraud and political party killer Donna the Brazil-nut is being trotted out. She did so well for Hillary and all. The degree of hysteria and smearing of Jeff Sessions shows how much they fear him. And how important to a Trump administration he is.

The very idea of an Attorney General Sessions and his staff assisting President Trump in deconstructing Obama and Valerie Jarrett’s Three Little Pigs House of Sticks legal theories and executive orders, lawfare lawsuits, secret transfers of cash currency to Iran, memorandums of understanding from Mexico to funnel in criminal aliens from third countries, and assorted other schemes is so terrifying that the ultimate weapon is being deployed. Twitter. And not just any twitter but third rung tattooed television actresses have “heard” that Jeff Sessions is racist. “heard” has been strategically included to prevent these legal theorist actresses from being sued. They aren’t saying it they just “heard” it you see. Maybe at their tattoo parlor.

A recent CSPAN rerun, I caught the end of it. Could not believe how “in step” with Trump this guy now seems to be. So impressed, that I stayed on to catch a bit of Nikki Haley who’s not the greatest speaker but also spoke Trump talk. What’s going on? Too good to be true, or genuine pivot?

Tony Stark et al – What I meant in my earlier post about Pence being sent the bill instead of menses (which by the way, are is not blood, but does contain some), is that he should pay for birthing and raising all the unwanted fetuses. That would be about one million per year at $250,000 per fetus, coming to $250,000,000,000 per year.

The right to life of the fetus is in direct opposition to women’s rights over their bodies. That is just like Islam’s religious rights are in direct opposition to women’s rights. The premise that personhood starts at conception is a religious/spritual/emotional belief that violates the separation of church and state. Forever have men used religion as an excuse to oppress women. And the fool women who emotionally support them in doing that.

If they State wants to rule for fetus rights, they need to pay for it. If people do not like late term abortions, they should offer services to remove the fetus after it can survive without the host. And they should take care of it. And pay the bill.

Yea, as an emotional issue, we are all ready to violate women’s rights. Those who want the rights need to take the responsibility. If they are unwilling to take the responsibility, then it becomes pure oppression of women, forcing them to have children they cannot take care of and paying them to work at 80% of a fair wage.

You cannot claim a fetus as a dependent on your tax returns, while medically it qualifies as a parasite feeding off the host.

Keep your law off my body. Mike Pence better know the rebellion will be here.

wbboei
November 18, 2016 at 8:03 pm
blowme0bama
November 18, 2016 at 4:51 pm
——
How about a 12 guage for ducks, and a 243 rifle for deer?
My grandfather was an avid hunter.
In turn of the century Montana most people were.
One day he shot for a duck and bought down a swan.https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=montana%20swan%20hunting
Which was illegal.
It can happen.
Consider the case of Dr. Werner Von Braun
He aimed for the stars, and hit London.
______________________________________

I’m not a deer hunter, but my understanding through much exposure is that a .243 is on the light end of what deer hunters use, but its not an inhumane caliber if the person is a good shot.

Yes, generally, duck hunters use a 12 ga – but it is actually the shot size and the choke constriction that make the difference. The tighter the choke, the more dense the pattern at a given range. Of course, if the birds are in close, you want a wide pattern with plenty of shot. The smaller shot size keeps the meat from being destroyed and provides more pellets in the air. We always go for the close shots – get them to decoy is the art of it, and there is an “art” to it.

Idiots at Hamilton on Broadway booed Pence and his wife and then got a lecture from a cast member…
How childish, how so left…thumb sucking time.
Some clapped, but really, glad he walked out during the cast members diatribe.

This comment about the Hamilton story is perfect: It’s amazing how stupid liberals are. How does it feel to have your whole thought process controlled by the media. They set the narrative and you idiots go along with it like herd animals. It’s ridiculous. Are you even capable of independent thought and figuring things out for yourselves?

Mormaer
November 19, 2016 at 6:21 am
——–
It isn’t until you really think this thing through that you realize why the ancien regime will not go quietly into the night, and why a guillotine is necessary.

a. their credibility: based on a showing of how graphically they prostrated themselves to the democrat party. Avant le deluge this could be deduced from the unbalanced nature of their coverage. But the affirmative defense was the are just democrats so naturally they favor democrats. But now, thanks to wikileaks, it has be PROVEN that they are active co-conspirators with one party to destroy the leading candidate of the other party, and to elevate a fundamentally corrupt person into the highest office in the land. That sort of disclosure is enough to seal their fate. There is no coming back from that. It is the smoking gun of all smoking guns. No sensible person will ever take them seriously when they pretend to be neutral. No sensible person will see them as journalists, as opposed to propagandists. Their continuing efforts to relitigate the election results is rapidly pushing them off the stage/

b. their contacts: all the snitches they bribed and coddled for information are now worrying about their own skin as the grim reaper strolls into the bureaucracy to give it a haircut, starting at the neck. That meas a loss of access and influence. The call from the corrupt reporter goes something like this: hello, this is Lance Romance ace reporter for NYT. Are you okay? No. Can we talk. No. Why not? Because now I have got to worry about my job, and it no secret that if I am seen kibuting with you, I am toast. So what does Lance do now? He hopes the RINOS will infiltrate the administration because he has dirt on them from previous days. But sadly, that is not happening, and the people who are getting vetted are not about to confide in big media. Where then is Lance going to go for inside information which he can use to tear down Trump? The only place left is the DNC who have just lost 80% of the executive branch, the senate, the court, the governorships, and are involved in interecine battles. All Lance can do is invent shit, and whenever he does that he gets trapped like a rat. His last resort is to incite violence, and that is what he is doing.

c. their career: yes, they have spent the past eight years shitting in tall cotton. Now, they have nothing left to sell, so where do their go. Who will hire them. They are caught between their owners who want to globalist agenda, their audience that wants no part of it, and bosses like Jeff Zucker, that bald as a billiard ball ceo who could not manage his way around an oreo. The journalist schools don’t want them. They are not the future of journalism, they are the death of journalism. And then, there is the challenge posed by social media, which is capable of delivering all the news, not just the slice that fits a pre conceived narrative, and to do it in real time. Finally, the economics of their business foreshadow its demise. Who needs the limosine liberals with 7 figure salaries, these proven liars, these thinly desguised nickel back whores for gloablism, etc. telling us what we must believe, when with very little effort, we can find the real truth with very little effort. That is where it gets funny because the minute these assholes put out their false narrative, they are immediately attacked, and that will only intensify.

gonzotx
November 19, 2016 at 9:45 am
——-
Retired Marine Corps General Mattis is being considered for the job of Secretary of Defense.

He is a keen student of military history through the ages, the consummate Marine, a soldier who has devoted his life to the warrior creed, and in the right light, he bears a vague resemblance to you know who.

Well, since he doesn’t understand the concept of “dialogue”, I suggest someone blindside this actor when he is hanging out with people he knows. Use a bullhorn. Tell him how your great hope, and that of so many others, is that he doesn’t rape any women, or defecate on any doorsteps, etc.

Another irony is that Hamilton is one of the people who came up with the Electoral College to protect small states from the tyranny of more populous, larger states, which these progressive actors want to abolish.

Based on the video clip of Romney leaving the Trump meeting he got the “Don’t call me, don’t say my name, do not even THINK of interfering in any way” treatment. Mitt looked like a whipped dog. The “meeting” which was over an hour probably consisted of Mitt sitting in a room alone for 55 minutes and then 5 minutes of “the talk”. Lucky Trump.

Based on the video clip of Romney leaving the Trump meeting he got the “Don’t call me, don’t say my name, do not even THINK of interfering in any way” treatment. Mitt looked like a whipped dog. The “meeting” which was over an hour probably consisted of Mitt sitting in a room alone for 55 minutes and then 5 minutes of “the talk”. Lucky Trump.
——
Yes. He was a picture of dejection. But he got a photo op out of it, with the president elect. If he believed he was going to walk out of the room with a secretary of state appointment, then I can understand his disappointment. In his terse statement he did allude to American interests around the world as a topic of discussion. That suggests he was interested in the secretary of state position. And why not? If he looks outside his four story billion dollar mansion on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, he can see Russia.

This time, Cuellar is seeking reinforcements from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Reps. Mike McCaul, R-San Antonio, and John Carter, R-Round Rock.
———
I met with Henry when I was working for Hillary in Laredo in 2008.

He is a straight shooter–and a good man.

He is one of the few democrats in Congress you can rely on to do right by the country.

I am so tired of race, race, race. I don’t walk around with my race in front of my eyes whenever I interpret something, hear something, see something, eat something, read something, etc. Oh, someone would say, that’s because you’re privileged. No, I’d say that’s because you invented a theory and can’t get over yourself and get a real life and take responsibility for it.

I can’t wait for the era of Obama to end. I welcome back a world where competence is valued again, and where people who think that “Jeh” spells “Jay” aren’t promoted to government jobs. I was very surprised 8 years (and since) to see how much racism there is against whites in the black world. Now I think, fine, if you want to feel that way, but you don’t get 24/7 attention anymore because of it, you can now just fester in your own juices and leave everyone else alone. As far as I’m concerned, they can take that hideous anti-social music with them.

The whites, blacks, and Asians who are normal can go on being pro-social, caring about our neighbors, doing the work of the country, raising good kids, and all the race obsessed idiot whites, blacks (no Asians I know of) can just (&^#*^% self-deleted for obscenities)….

I remember there were always two types of polls about Obama (I can’t remember this being true for previous presidents…?) – a regular poll, and a personal favorability poll. Even when he polled less well, his personal favorability poll was always high. I always felt the personal favorability numbers were fake, but they gave people a chance to soften their regular poll answer to decrease the chances of being called racist. Perhaps the “headed in right direction” and “approval rating” are working in the same way.

I wonder if anyone in the Hamilton cast voted for Trump, because if I were in the cast and I voted for Trump, there is no way I could be silent about it. I just couldn’t do it, I’d be going hell yeah I voted for Trump! Hell Yeah!! Trump/Pence!

lorac
November 19, 2016 at 7:48 pm
I remember there were always two types of polls about Obama (I can’t remember this being true for previous presidents…?) – a regular poll, and a personal favorability poll. Even when he polled less well, his personal favorability poll was always high. I always felt the personal favorability numbers were fake, but they gave people a chance to soften their regular poll answer to decrease the chances of being called racist. Perhaps the “headed in right direction” and “approval rating” are working in the same way.
_________________________________________

Yeah, I remember that bullshit. You don’t hear that “although a majority of people personally like him” garbage any more.

I was like, “what in the world is there to like about him?”; smarmy, churlish, vindictive. So incongruent: “yeah, this idiot is setting the garbage can on fire, but I like him”.

I’ve heard for so long that the markets would be crashing in the fall. We’re running out of “fall”, so maybe it will happen in the winter or spring.

It just occurred to me, though, if it were to happen this fall or winter, Trump would be blamed, even though the talk about it has been going on before he was even considered to have a chance at winning.

I’m wondering, though, if the knowledge that he won might affect the chances of it happening – if people or institutions will do things that lead to it being less likely to happen. Right now the market has been going up. I guess that doesn’t guarantee that it won’t still crash. I just don’t know enough about what all the factors are to know why and what is all happening.

I’ve been worried about the market crashing again, especially since it’s only 8 years since the last time. It would be really nice to get to “skip that step” lol

“National Public Radio ombudsman/public editor Elizabeth Jensen has recommended that the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views..”
**
“In her response, “Listeners: Two Recent Interviews Are ‘Normalizing Hate Speech’,” Jensen concluded that the live format had allowed Pollak to get the better of host Steve Inskeep.”
**
“She suggested that future interviews be taped: “In addition, in my opinion, these interviews should not be done live. Inskeep is an excellent live interviewer, but live interviews are difficult, especially when there is limited time. A little contextualizing never hurts.”

I used to listen to NPR all day long at work, and usually on the weekends I would listen to Car Talk, A Way with Words, and the game shows. When my eyes started opening in 2008, I realized that not only were they favoring dems, they were favoring O over Hillary. I stopped listening.

SHV
November 20, 2016 at 12:42 am
Past time to pull the tax payer funding of NPR:
——-
Two reactions:

First, she has given us the perfect justification to do exactly that—and she would have gotten away with it if Hillary had won. This was to have been part of a scorched earth attempt by the left to shut down opposing points of view, under the purely subjective assertion that they ware “hateful”. What is hateful is often in the mind of the beholder, but these people aspire to not let the market place decide what it will listen to, but to become the sole arbiter of that question. This was, perhaps, the stupidest thing the head of this organization could have done for the entity she represents. It rivals the stupidity of Harrigan, inter alia. I am happy she said this because it relieves us of the need to flush out the quail.

Second, the statement itself is entirely gratuitous, and virtue signalling. Why? Because there was never a time where NPR invited a conservative to speak on their program, much less someone who could be objectively labelled as hateful. NPP has been a steady drivel of left wing clap trap and Obama worship as far back as the eye can see. How nice of them to put themselves on front street, for the elimination of public funding. Let Soros take up the slack—in his last will and testament.

By the way, where HAVE you been. We have missed your wise commentary these past few years. Please stay around awhile. You can breathe easy now that the Second Amendment will survive. If the election had gone the other way, Hillary was coming for our guns. As in, I believe in open borders, no guns, no law, racial division and a global elite. Not exactly a Norman Rockwell future under that scenario.

“SHV…
where have you been hiding?”
****
Been lurking but didn’t want to risk the possibility that commenting might jinx the last chance to blow up the Uni-party. :>) Not usually superstitious but after 8 years of Obama, anything is possible.

The decision by Quasimodo Merkel to run for a fourth term can only serve to enhance the candidacy of Le Pen in France, who is rising in the polls. Quasi is a controlled beast, who has been ringing the bell of fellow Germans, hollowing out their culture, promoting rapes and lawlessness, and saddling a great national economy with inextinguishable debt. The decision by Breitbart to expand to Europe to bolster the nationalistic push back to the destruction of Europe and the promotion of the world wide caliphate is strategically timed. Breitbart will shine the light of truth on the elite media of Europe, including The Economist who are all in for the EU. The most likely outcome is a Le Pen win in France, and a Merkel loss in Germany. I think the elites are finally on the defensive.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.
———-
This is from his latest article: Why Don’t We Skip Thanksgiving. It explains the hyperbolic reaction by the left to the loss of the election to Trump. As with low life Meeagain, what happens to the country is irrelevant, because its all about them.
——–

What we have been witnessing since the election of Donald Trump is nothing short of a national nervous breakdown the likes of which I have never seen. This breakdown is happening almost exclusively on the left, the losing side, again in a manner never seen. I have lived through many elections in which the right lost and never saw anything roughly equivalent on their part—no endless protests in the streets, no hug-ins on campuses, no cancellations of tests and classes as if there had been an 8.2 earthquake followed by a tsunami, etc. Even on the left, the protests have been within bounds. This time, however, they are endless, egged on by many in the media and in our universities and schools, including, most abominable of all, K-12.

The rap is that this all stems from the nature of Donald Trump—the racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc., etc.

Nonsense. That is what the shrinks call “the presenting complaint”—and not just because calling Trump a sexist when he contested Hillary Clinton, who enabled, actually justified, her husband’s behavior inside the White House and out, or homophobic, even though Trump was pro-gay marriage back in 1998-99, almost fifteen years before Obama and Clinton “evolved” on the question, and was the first to have an “out” gay man (Peter Thiel) speak at a national convention won’t wash.

No, there’s something far more important going on than the usual racism, sexism, yaddayaddayadda. Consciously or not, the left— liberals, progressives, call them what you or they will—are afraid, even petrified, Trump will be a good, possibly great president. (He’s not doing badly right now.) That would call to question everything they had ever thought and result in personality disintegration and loss of self. They wouldn’t know who they were. It would be a wound to their (self-promotion alert) moral narcissism the likes of which they have never experienced.

So they are acting out on all fronts and this highly neurotic, intermittently violent behavior is apt to continue for a long time. (Just think how they’ll react if the lives of African-Americans actually improve under Trump.) The media too will be looking to justify their bias as never before. To do otherwise might make them face the “remote possibility” that there could, in reality, be something wrong with them and the way they go about their work.

My take on Roger’s insights on the hyperbolic reaction of the left. And, by the way, this also explains they love for Obama.

The election of Trump, and the distinct possibility that he will succeed in office, despite the opposition of shit head Schumer, is agonizing to the left, because it raises the specter of “the death of me”–me being all the pretensions, the preening, the virtue signalling, the whole phony fact free morality play they have been invested in for decades, which places them in the position of the avenger, the white knight, the freedom fighter even when they are destroying freedom, all that they believe makes them so special.

Not surprised at the possible Melania Trump 5th Avenue arrangement. Melania is a momma tiger around her cub. Do not mess with Barron. I am sure conjugal and / or State visits to the White House will be arranged as required.

KATIE HOPKINS: Celebrities, please note: Just because we pay you to entertain us it doesn’t mean we want to hear your lectures – any more than we did when you were waiting tables

If you heard the boos from the audience you might assume the Vice President-elect was chasing gay cast members of the hit musical Hamilton around the stage with electrodes and a bible.

‘You try being gay and threatened with shock-conversion by a man who has the audacity to want to see your show,’ said some wounded snowflake on my Twitter feed

And that’s the nub of it. A leading Republican has the audacity to want to watch this hip hop musical biography of one of the founding fathers of the United States.

The musical celebrates diversity of colour, sexuality, race and gender. And some of the audience felt Pence had no right to share in the celebration and invade their safe space.

According to Variety, the performance was sporadically disrupted by loud booing at the presence of this strongly conservative and evangelical Christian.

Some even protested outside, holding up well-received lines from the play such as ‘Immigrants: we get the job done’. Almost as if they hadn’t got a job or a home to go to.

And if all this hostility wasn’t enough for a family man trying to heal the wounds of a divisive campaign, Pence was subjected to a monologue after the curtain call from one of the actors, who awarded himself an encore with a fawning cast of luvvies behind him:

‘We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us.’

Pass the sick bag.

Can you imagine anything more vomit-inducing than paying (thousands of dollars for this hottest of tickets) to watch a musical, have it ruined by booing from the right-on brigade, then being lectured at by an actor paid to recite other people’s lines for a living?

An actor lauded for pretending to be someone else — one of the founding fathers, perhaps — desperately inhabiting the character a little longer, presuming the authority to lecture us on politics?

News flash for the cast of Hamilton: you are not actually part of the Washington elite. You have not been elected. You are paid performers who make people happy for money. Like prostitutes. Or waiters when you are ‘resting’.

You might argue this is freedom of speech, protected under the first amendment. But speech is not free if your audience has paid to listen, particularly if it has come to listen to a musical.

Why do luvvies that they think they deserve to have more than one vote in the ballot box? That somehow they should be accorded a greater platform from which to lecture all those they consider less informed?

snip

In fact, the Academy Awards 2016 were just one long nag-fest of causes, from climate change to banking reform, racial under-representation to sexual abuse on campus.

Why don’t actors understand all we want them to do is act?

I also question why it is those who preach tolerance, like the cast of Hamilton, who are so incapable of being tolerant themselves.

A crowd of people who celebrate diversity, sexual freedom and racial equality, absolutely incapable of accepting a white-haired gentleman as part of their audience.

They preach diversity but fail to accept diversity of thought or opinion. There is only one opinion allowed. And it’s theirs.

Could it be that Clinton’s fan-girls and adorables are actually far worse than Trump’s basket of deplorables? That those who preach tolerance cannot stand to hear a view other than their own?

The cast of Hamilton should be ashamed. They have no right to lecture Vice President-elect Mike Pence or challenge his space in the theatre. It seems to me, those who preach tolerance have become the most intolerant of them all.

I am struck that Clinton’s campaign based on entirely on race, gender, sexuality and colour has resulted in a new divide. These actors want to protect these differentiators. They don’t want Pence to embrace them. They don’t want to be the same.

Their biggest fear is acceptance, because then they cease to be special.

Worst since 1922.
9:16 AM – 13 Nov 2016
—-
Yet all we hear from BIG MEDIA BELOVED MESSIAH is how successful his presidency has been, one victory after another. . . .

Given the fact that 50 of his executive orders will be cancelled on day 1 of the Trump presidency, judges will now be appointed who will follow the constitution rather than the mandates of Obama’s masters, aka the global elite class, and his signature achievement which bears his name, i.e. Obama care will be obliterated, and the stark decline of his party as illustrated by the figures above–and speaks of victory, the words of Pyrrus of Epira come to mind: “One more such victory, and the party I lead shall be ruined.”

“Republicans, with a narrow majority in the Senate, should be able confirm their colleague (Jeff Sessions as Attorney General), especially since soon-to-be-former Sen. Harry REID NUKED THE ABILITY OF THE MINORITY TO FILIBUSTER PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENTS. But before that happens, look for the noise and the anger over the Sessions nomination to increase. There’s too much at stake for Democrats to go along–because of Sessions firm stand on immigration law enforcement–which Schumer hates with a passion.”

“Maybe [Clinton] is more than a president,” gushed writer Virginia Heffernan. “Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself,”

What is it with these people? They needed Obama to be a magical, suprahuman person, too. They must like fantasies.

…. and it makes this sentence really make sense:

I understand being upset and angry at your candidate’s loss, but this is something different; this is what happens, not when a politician does badly, but when your savior, your Athena, “light itself,” is extinguished. The grief is understandable only in the context of the apocalyptic faith they had put in Hillary.

And they’re doing the same thing now with Trump, in reverse. They’ve built up all these lies about him, and now they’re freaking out because the world is most certainly going to come to an end now. They never think to examine their premises.

“Obama urged his fellow Democrats to try to work with Trump’s team if what it’s doing is good for the country. But he cautioned that if the Trump administration begins to attack American values, he might be compelled to speak up…”
****
IMHO, a sociopathic light weight like Obama, making threats toward Alpha Male President Trump, who, BTW will control all of the resources of the Federal Gov’t, is making a BAAAD mistake.

Just 60 days left of listening to the phony stutter, fake affected accent based on audience, dropping “g’s” and my all time non-favorite, the use of the word “folks”. Good-bye Obama, good-bye and good riddance.

Obama just can’t help himself, the thought of being Mr Irrelevant terrifies him.
What he means is he will continue to stir racism and gin up the libtards. He will keep stirring the pot of discontent with the anarchist’s.

What has been the deal behind all of the Democratic, globalist, elite, professional do-gooder butthurt? In the stages of loss/grief Kubler-Ross has denial, anger, bargaining, depression then acceptance. In their own weird, childish and extreme in-grouping way that is what we are seeing. Their loss is status, money, stability and a future they thought was set. And then it wasn’t.

The posturing, spite, vitriol is about their world upended. Even tap dancers on Broadway are upset and lashing out even if they don’t know what they are talking about. Their problem is very few in the hinterlands care. We’ve been through this for the past eight years (and more) and the last 18 months in the extreme. More of the same seems to be all they got. Obama is now promising to heckle from stage left instead of retiring in dignity. Soros must have offered him some money to continue his public humiliation.

Trump is doing a great job with his new show “The Hire”. Great theater with every Republican known to the public being required to show up with a spit-shine and run the gauntlet. Besides telling them all to get with the program, establishing a pecking order, they may even hire a few. And the idiots in the media can’t tear their cameras away. Or stop speculating. And Trump, Pence, etc of the transitions team get to show up on TV and say nothing of any importance except “great Americans”. Notice who isn’t being called in. In pecking order they are the dirt.

Dirty Harry Reid has handed the keys to the kingdom to Trump. His “rules” for the Senate will assure that every single nomination Trump wants will go through. There will be some melodrama and tears but even old shifty Schumer knows the deal is done. All the Dems and GOPe have left is some virtue signaling. Like the cadaver of Kissinger said this week “Trump has no baggage” so the Senate has no leverage. The hostile takeover is moving fast in the consolidation of power. Lucky Trump.

Jeff Sessions is the quarterback in the dismantling of the illegal immigrant scam. Trump of course is the coach and is going to assemble a supporting team to accomplish it all. There are so many vectors of disease I am very interested to see what is targeted first or if they are going after numerous things concurrently. The sanctuary cities will be forced to hand over criminal illegal aliens or be arrested themselves for harboring criminals. I don’t think that is what they are worried about. The money is what they are worried about. The cost shifting to cover the social and criminal and economic costs of this population is what they are worried about. The feds and many state governments have subsidized very heavily these populations so Dem cities can use them to get elected and jack up their census numbers for even more free cost shifted money from across the country (and their allotted number of legislators) as well as cheap labor for business and elites and bloated school populations for teacher unions and the education lobbies. If these cities really, really want and need illegal immigrants (non criminal) then they should be happy to pay for their costs via taxation from their own tax base and taxpayers should welcome it to prove how “good” they are. Taxpayers in Wyoming should not be required to pay for the housing and medical care of graffiti artists in LA or busboys in fancy restaurants in NYC. Cost/benefit will lead the way. The cost is great and the benefit is in doubt since it can’t win them the White House thanks to the electoral college.

The Mexican government’s ass is in a crack and I can’t stop laughing. They sent their excess population to live in the US, send money back to them, negotiated trade deals again at discount labor rates and working conditions, told their criminals and psychotics to head El Norte so they didn’t have to deal with them, and embraced globalism like they were grandees of Spain (who are also up shit creek). The peso (the word means weight in Spanish or Latin) has no weight and is in danger of becoming one of the world’s joke currencies like the drachma used to be pre-EU. Now they are looking at returning wised up peasants who are pissed off that the reconquering of Aztlan fizzled without firing a shot. And hardened criminals and lots of crazy people coming back mixing with drug cartels. And Jeff Sessions has a plan to do away with birthright citizenship in the courts after a few Trump Supreme Court appointments. Hurra la revolución!

SHV
November 20, 2016 at 10:46 pm
As near as I can tell ALL of the globalist, Dem, progressive push-back is about their goodness and superior values. Name-calling, election cheating, dehumanizing people who don’t agree with them, death threats of a president elect seem to be their values and not so superior. Of course they are the ones determining the goodness and values and anyone elses values or worth is shit. “This isn’t who we are” being just one of often mouthed shibboleths used to shut people up and go along with the con. Hillary ran on that old saw as hard as she could and lost the electoral college, which they like a lot when they win, in a landslide. It sounds increasingly dopey which it is upon examination. We are a nation of laws not platitudes and vapid virtue signaling requiring other to pay for their feelings of goodness. To point out that this simplistic belief is childishly stupid is deeply upsetting to them.

If Obama insists on acting like a dick and criticizing Trump’s administration, then Trump should unleash Sessions on him and call for a special prosecutor to thoroughly investigate him over Hillary’s email server, Benghazi, Fast and Furious and the IRS targeting of conservatives.

“The Midwest is red, and we need to try to get it back,” said Dingell. “Point blank, we’ve forgotten who our base is. Our base needs to be broad. It isn’t ‘us versus them,’ it’s ‘we’ — but we’ve got to remember who the ‘we’ is.”

Other Democrats said that repeated attacks on Trump and paying attention to only the needs of minority and women voters turned off working-class voters.

b>So much of this is identity politics,” said Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI)

*******************************

for the last 8 years the echo chamber in the Democratic party has been all about “identity politics” and pitting people against each other…

sad and sickening…they have become exceedingly racist towards everyone that does agree with them…they cannot ‘tolerate’ another POV and will scream over you or insult you and call you names…

interesting… on the streets, people like to say women are emotional but men are rational… but it turns out we inherit our intelligence from our maternal side, and emotions from paternal side…

———————

Now, scientists have known for some time that intelligence is hereditary – as much as 60% our intelligence, in fact. And they’ve suspected that it probably comes from the mother. That’s because the X chromosome carries the gene for intelligence, and women have two of these chromosomes while men have only one.

….

But conditional genes are what seem to have proven this theory. After studying the genes that comprise our cerebral cortexes, scientists discovered only maternal genes were present. Our fathers’ genes, on the other hand, seem to instead congregate in the limbic system.

dot48
November 21, 2016 at 11:53 am
——————————————-
Short answer is no. Marsh has her own site and I left after she became an Obama-loving acolyte. There were some unreliable articles back in 2008 speculating who admin really is.

She was all pro-Hillary, until she decided that O was going to win. She wanted to get credentials to the DNC or the inauguration, I forget. So she on a dime went full-bore Obama. Taylor Marsh was all about name-brand, while admin toils in anonymity. Taylor Marsh chases opportunity. Admin follows integrity. I also vote, “no way” they’re the same person.

Ha. Obama is threatening to not leave the stage gracefully. As uf anybody cares what he does. Yes he’s staying in D.C. and is going to be commenting on Trump’s administration. Oooooh. I’m sure Trump is just so scared. Not. How hilarious. Obama, will be in D.C. with no influence whatsoever, looking like am idiot, thinking he’s still President, and Trump will be running the country from Trump Tower in Manhattan. He’ll probably never go to Washington. Obama’s not going to know what is going on. He’s going to be blabbing on, thinking he is relevant and smart. Entirely clueless that it’s over for him. Even Kanye likes Trump. Oh boy, this is gonna be good.